How about a 'selfie' on toast

We know it's the age of "selfies" (self-portraits), but this has got to be the ultimate: You can have your likeness burned into a piece of toast. All it takes is the right toaster.

The Vermont Novelty Toaster Co. sells them for $75. Upload a photo of yourself, your pet, or your favorite picture. They'll create a personalized toaster using a CNC Plasma machine (using a plasma jet to cut steel). That creates the template that is inserted into the toaster and burns in your image with every slice.

The price for the toaster isn't bad, but here's what's crumbly, so to speak: It doesn't come with interchangeable plates. So if everyone in a family of four wants personalized bread, that'd be four toasters. Still, it's a strange gift idea for the person who has everything, such as Joy's aunt, who's pretty unusual herself.

App Happy

•"Skit!" is a fun app for kids who are enchanted with "The Lego Movie." Use Lego characters like "WyldStyle" and "Good Cop" to make a brief cartoon. We didn't like the results we got, but we may not be the right age.

•"The Singing Machine Mobile" is an iPhone/iPad app for karaoke singing. There are 14 free songs to sing along with, with the lyrics showing up on your screen. We tried "America the Beautiful" and a few Beach Boys hits. For Android users, there's the "Sing! Karaoke" app by Smule.

Renting Your Vacation Home

We've used the website "VRBO" (vacation rentals by owner) to rent a house, instead of the typical hotel room. If you've got a home to rent to others, the website HotSpotTax.com takes some of the tax complications out. We didn't like the one we rented, but maybe you have something better.

The website claims to offer the only automated Web-based tax filing for people who rent their homes through VRBO, Air BnB, HomeAway, Flipkey and others. You log into the site once a month to report how much rent you received, and the system fills out the forms, files the returns, registers the property and makes the tax payments. The fee costs $8 to $12 a month. It also tracks tax rate changes in each state.

The Programmer's Way

CourseReport.com claims that schools and camps teaching programming, often called "coding," will bring in $60 million in tuition for the year and graduate 5,987 coders, a 175 percent increase over last year. Tuition can cost up to $20,000, with the average around $10,000 for courses ranging from nine to 12 weeks. All in all, this seems expensive to us.

You can try teaching yourself programming, instead. Many have done it and it can even be fun. What's hot now is the programming language "Ruby." Head over to Oreilly.com, QuePublishing.com, or NoStarch.com for books on the subject. If you go on Quora.com and search "I am 24 and want to be a programmer," you can read how one woman built her Spitfire app, using Meetup.com to meet fellow programmers and free resources such as "Learn Ruby the Hard Way," "Try Ruby," CodeAcademy, "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby," "Ruby on Rails," and "Railscasts."

Your Phone in Bright Sunlight

We've always loved the original Kindle's "e-ink" screen. It's easy to read in bright sunlight. Now there's an "InkCase Plus" that does the same thing for your smartphone.

The InkCase is still in a crowd-funding stage with Kickstarter. But in two days, the founders blew by their $100,000 goal, to well over $150,000, which indicates to us there's a lot of interest in a screen you can read in sunlight. Put it in your tickle file, or sign up to be notified when the screen is real.

Word Tips

Microsoft Word has lots of keyboard shortcuts, and here are some of the more useful:

To highlight a whole sentence: In Windows, hold down the "Ctrl" key and click on any word in that sentence. You can chop it out by hitting Ctrl X and paste it elsewhere in the document by going there and pressing Ctrl V, or, you can just dump it. (After all, Faulkner advised writers to kill any sentence they were particularly proud of.) On the Mac, use the Cmd key instead of Ctrl.

You can turn your Word screen into a desktop whiteboard. Start with a blank page, then click twice anywhere on the page and start typing. Double click again on another part of the page and put something else there. Keep going as you wish. To cycle through recent edits, hold down the shift key and tap F5. To add the date and time, click "insert" and "Date and time."

There are a lot of how-to Word guides at ShaunaKelly.com/word.

Internuts

•Foodgawker.com/popular/favorites lists its most "favorited" recipes. The pictures look good enough to eat. Joy liked the "Spicy Raw Thai Salad."

•Mathrun.net has timed math quizzes. Use your keyboard's left arrow to mark an equation correct. Use your right arrow to mark it incorrect. It starts with very simple arithmetic and goes up from there.

•MusicTheory.net teaches you music theory, starting with bass and clef notes and finishing with an analysis of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata."

•Google the phrase "100 Skills Every Man Should Know" to find an article in Popular Mechanics with instructions on how to build a fire in the wilderness, check trouble codes on your car, and so on.

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